Morphological Computation in Plant Seeds for a New Generation of Self-Burial and Flying Soft Robots

Abstract

Plants have evolved different mechanisms to disperse from parent plants and improve germination to sustain their survival. The study of seed dispersal mechanisms, with the related structural and functional characteristics, is an active research topic for ecology, plant diversity, climate change, as well as for its relevance for material science and engineering. The natural mechanisms of seed dispersal show a rich source of robust, highly adaptive, mass and energy efficient mechanisms for optimized passive flying, landing, crawling and drilling. The secret of seeds mobility is embodied in the structural features and anatomical characteristics of their tissues, which are designed to be selectively responsive to changes in the environmental conditions, and which make seeds one of the most fascinating examples of morphological computation in Nature. Particularly clever for their spatial mobility performance, are those seeds that use their morphology and structural characteristics to be carried by the wind and dispersed over great distances (i.e. “winged” and “parachute” seeds), and seeds able to move and penetrate in soil with a self-burial mechanism driven by their hygromorphic properties and morphological features. By looking at their motion mechanisms, new design principles can be extracted and used as inspiration for smart artificial systems endowed with embodied intelligence. This mini-review systematically collects, for the first time together, the morphological, structural, biomechanical and aerodynamic information from selected plant seeds relevant to take inspiration for engineering design of soft robots, and discusses potential future developments in the field across material science, plant biology, robotics and embodied intelligence.

4D Printing of Humidity‐Driven Seed Inspired Soft Robots

“…The Erodium awn is characterized by homogeneous‐sized cells in the inner tissues with a gradient cellulose concentration along its thickness. [ 6,15 ]…”

“…The Erodium awn is characterized by homogeneous-sized cells in the inner tissues with a gradient cellulose concentration along its thickness. [6,15] Due to its compositional and morphological nature, the awn in P. appendiculatum can be split into an effective bilayer, which makes it more suitable for the design and bioinspiration of an artificial equivalent seed based on bilayered hygroscopic structure. [23] The cap and ridge layer stiffness were analyzed separately, due to different morphological and compositional structures.…”

“…The emerging field of soft robotics has attracted increasing attention for its ability to build shape-changing intelligent machines, DOI: 10.1002/advs.202205146 taking advantage of the adaptability and deformability properties of the materials involved. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] In environmental applications, a soft robot should be able to move, grow and/or evolve, adapting its morphology to the environmental stimuli and biodegrade at the end of its life cycle. [9,10] Furthermore, the increase in energy demand in the field of robotics requires a new class of Embodied Energy autonomous robots, [11] which use environment renewable energy to perform their functions with spatialtemporal continuity.…”

A printed luminescent flier inspired by plant seeds for eco-friendly physical sensing

“…In the first step, we studied the morphology, structure, aerodynamics, and dispersion parameters of the natural samara seeds with the goal of identifying key principles relevant to the design and development of the artificial seeds with the same aerodynamic and dispersion capabilities ( 14 ). We used fused deposition modeling as 3D printing technology to produce artificial samara seeds with the same aerodynamic and wind-distribution features.…”

“…In this way, the probability of being dispersed by the wind and spread is highly enhanced. Samara seeds portray a fascinating example of morphological computation in nature as their morphology enables the passive autorotation mechanism of flight, i.e., no additional energy input comes from the seed ( 14 ). Samara seeds have been built with electronic-based and not biocompatible sensor networks for in situ atmospheric monitoring ( 15 , 16 ) and fire detection ( 16 ).…”